I think I just heard a collective gasp of shock from many, many women around the world. As a woman myself I can barely believe I've asked the question. But I've noticed many of us have mentioned our ages in one post or another...so it should be okay, right?

This is a two-part question: how old are you now, and how old were you when you started to write/first started thinking of writing?

For me, I will turn 27 in April. I wrote my first "book" at six (it was the fully illustrated "How to Take Care of your Bunny Book" to try to convince my parents to buy me a rabbit. They never did, maybe because I drew a picture of a girl walking her bunny on a leash...) and I've wanted to be an author all my life. I started my first novel at 19. Currently I'm finishing edits on my second with three more outlines in the works.

(And obviously, y'all, if you feel uncomfortable answering one or both questions there is no obligation. We're all friends here and I'd like it to stay that way...please don't "out" me!)

Brenda :)

Inspiration isn't about the muse. Inspiration is working until something clicks. ~Brandon Sanderson

I'm 26. One of those cliched "I've been writing stories ever since I knew how to write" sorts. I wrote a novella at around 13 (a really, really, tragically bad vampire novella), and started numerous other books that I never quite finished. I focused on poetry and nonfiction in college, but am back to fiction now.

I'm 19 and started writing when I was 3 (on the walls, does that count?).

I wrote my first complete little novel when I was 13 (an odd tale somewhere between Nanria meets LOTR meets Discworld). I won't lie to you, that first story makes me cringe to think about (I seem to remember burning it in a fit of embarassment at some point) but at least it got me started. Anyhow, I let the writing take a back seat during the rest of my teenage years and only truly started writing again last year. I can't, for the life of me, remember why I eased up on the writing now... It's a blast.

Geez, I feel like some kind of geezer here amngst all of you young whippersnappers. I'm a youngish 51 and I was the guy in high school English class that everyone hated because I could do a 2K word story in study hall and still have goof-off time left over.

I took a long break from fiction, but continued to do technical writing during my Navy career. It wasn't until about six or seven years ago that I rekindled my love affair with fiction writing. See, you younguns never had to edit a typewritten page when you wanted to make a change and quite frankly, if it wasn't for word processors I would be making clay jars or something for my hobby.

I'm 32, and I started writing when I was a kid, soon after I started reading seriously (The Hobbit, grade 3). Started my first novel when I was 21 or 22 for my Master's Thesis. 350K or so... I believe I set a thesis record.

I'm 27 and I started writing my first few attempts at novels on my parents' typewriter when I was about 7 years old. It was horribly tedious because I didn't know how to type (so a sentence took about 15 minutes to get on the page) and any mistakes I made (and there were many) were usually followed by a very frustrated Emily yanking the paper out and crumpling it on the floor. Needless to say, I tended to get only a few pages in before I grew tired with the attempt. Composition notebooks and leather bound journals soon became my best friends. And now, I dearly love my computer.

I'm surprised how many people are the same age as me or near to it (cuz on another discussion forum I partake in, not writing-related, I'm on the few in their 20s).

I'm 26 -- turning 27 in two and a half weeks. I started writing in grade 8. We had to write a short story for English class and I had this really cool sci-fi thing going on. I was all set to hand it in and get a fantastic mark... then the teacher said, "I'm not collecting your short stories, that's just for your personal practice." I was SO pissed off. I went home and wrote two sequel short stories that weekend as a kind of "in your face!" revenge thing. Yes... my writing started because of revenge.

Anyway, wrote a ton of short stories throughout high school, always trying to get up to novel length, just not quite managing it. I was about to give up in grade 12, but then my English teacher allowed us to submit short stories as part of our projects (I wrote a sci-fi retelling of Hamlet and another sci-fi story on the subject of racism). What was even better than being able to do that? Having the teacher give honest feedback and very clearly seeing that he doesn't look down on sci-fi like all my other English teachers did. He was amazing. (I later found out that his wife is an international best-selling romance author -- she writes it out in notebooks and he types it on the computer -- and their son has a few sci-fi books published. So that would all be part of why he respected my interest in genre writing.)

So that renewed my interest in writing and six months after graduating grade 12 I was a finalist in a short story contest was soon published. That teacher, and then the contest soon following, re-energised my writing. I wrote a few long stories (between short stories and short novels, I guess) through university. After uni, I wrote a novel, but couldn't sell it. Then I took a break from fiction writing and did some non-fiction, which didn't turn out so hot, but in the end I did get four unpaid articles published. Now I'm working on Novel #2.

Okay, I'm geezing like r louis scott. It is interesting to see how young many of the Nathanians are. I'll be 53 in August and I have had stories in my head all my life. I have recited them to myself; I have lived them in my imagination; I have heard them in that time before dawn where reality mixes with dreams. Oddly, as a kid, I struggled with expressing these stories on a page and I primarily identified myself as a visual artist. Then in college I just stopped. My mother lamented my apparent divorce from my art. She had also always been dismayed at my struggle with written English because this was her primary means of self-expression. She loved to read and she enjoyed nothing more than writing something that would make other people laugh or smile. She died young when I was in my thirties, and as the years passed, I would always hear my mother's voice returning to me as I wrote. Because the link between my head and my fingers improved over thirty years of keyboard communication in my day job, it has recently felt natural for me to sit down and tell my stories, or my mother's stories, or my character's stories or whatever it is that comes from my fingers. Thanks for the thread.

Last edited by Seamus on February 26th, 2010, 8:38 am, edited 2 times in total.